


Moonlight Miles

by mustinvestigate



Series: Patsy Decline [4]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Multi, Undue Seriousness, bad medicine, silliness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:26:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2515844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits of backstory for Patsy (Incoming/Outgoing Courier).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Goodsprings

Doc Mitchell doesn’t expect his patient to live through the night. He'd subtracted two bullets, added three precious bags of O-positive, and had the whole mess sutured up by noon. A dozen delicately applied stimpacks sealed up the work and stimulated the beginnings of bone re-growth. It would take a few days to set and most likely leave her brow crooked, but it’s the shredded grey tissue underneath that worries him.

By sundown, her skin’s gone hot and dry as hardpan: infection.

He can’t risk any more stimpacks, not without throwing her into shock. He crushes a moldy xander root that’s been in the back of the fridge for months and gets her to swallow the paste, but he knows that’s just pissing on a grass fire. Only more stims could kill the gravedirt filth that’s growing in her brain, and if she’s still alive in the morning, it’ll be safe to give them to her. Until then, she’ll have to fight it herself or, more likely, go right back to the boneyard Victor dug her out of.

The doc settles into a chair at her bedside, offers up a quick prayer up to St Cayetano, and lets his exhausted body drop into a light doze that will break if his patient so much as passes wind too energetically.

A door slamming wakes him an hour before dawn. Cursing his tired bones for letting him sleep so deep, he hauls himself out of the rickety chair and follows the trail of blood and sand out the back door.

She stands, swaying, in his little garden, mother-naked and goggling up at the night sky. He notes with relief that she’s sweating enough to turn the sandy dirt on everything south of her sterilized head to streaks of mud. 

The fever’s broken.

He steps forward, letting the door slam behind him, ready to catch her if she swoons. Her head snaps away from the stars at the sound, and the look in her eyes – he’ll realise later, it reminds him of a bad case many years ago, a former Ranger-turned-caravan-guard back from Dogtown with a dose of the foaming madness just too far gone to treat – freezes his feet to the sand.

“You the ferryman?” Her voice is a crow’s caw and her eyes don’t quite focus together, but the question comes out steady, almost calm.

“No ma’am, I’ve never been on a boat in my life. Why don’t you – ”

“This is death,” she interrupts, only a last-minute lilt giving the statement an edge of doubt.

“Some might agree, but I’m a doctor, not a philosopher…or a sailor.” He moves closer…carefully. “It’s my medical opinion that you are very much alive, and that you’d have a better chance of staying that way if you were back in bed.”

He risks another step closer while she absorbs that, frowning in concentration.

“Had to take a piss,” she says after a moment. “Thought this was the bathroom.”

“I’ve got a toilet inside, if you’re feeling civilized.”

She shrugs at the joke and moves toward him, and he knows now how he slept through her escape. Even glassy-eyed and trembling, she makes no noise on the cracked, rocky earth. Her toes spread like fingers – he counts six on each foot, all long and functional – and she eases through each step so that nothing shifts or snaps underneath.

She leans hard on his arm, though, and what little urine she manages to pass is dark. When she’s settled on the bed again, he orders her to drink a bottle of spring water and improvises a saline drip. She fights the sleep she so obviously needs, watching with wary interest as he sets a needle in the good old median cubital vein, so he jabs a light dose of med-x in her other arm.

Minutes after it should have taken effect, she’s still awake, brushing at the sand lingering on her arms. “There’s grave on me.”

“You can take a bath tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

She grunts and closes her eyes, but pipes up again a few minutes later.

“Went to the lake like a sky,” she says, “but ferryman wouldn’t take me across.”

“Fevers can give a person strange dreams.”

“Why wouldn’t he take me?” she demands.

The doc sighs and shifts on his chair, the weight of 24 lead-lined hours on his eyelids. “Because the sandman has a prior claim on you. Go to sleep.”

“The sandman?” she murmurs, finally, _finally_ drifting off. “That his name?”

She sleeps through the next three days, wolfing down his simple meals without opening her eyes. The doc would worry, except her body’s immune system heals so quickly, so aggressively, he half expects it to reach out and sooth his rheumatoid-swollen knees. Her skull grows whole, leaving an ugly ridge bisecting one eyebrow, as expected; stims are powerful, but not magic. 

No, he sees the sallow complexion and sunken eyes of someone who’d worn herself to bones even before some maniac cracked her liberty bell, and that her body has leapt on the chance to bushwhack her into a little rest.

When her eyes finally stay open for more than five seconds, he asks after her name.

She frowns in hard thought, then shrugs. “Don’t have one.”

“Some memory loss is to be expected, after what you’ve been through, hopefully temporary,” he reassures. “Just take your time, it’ll come to you.”

She looks over his shoulder. “Think you said something about a bath?”

Awake, she makes him nervous. There’d been no need to shave away any hair before slicing into her skull, since it was already gone but for two thin stripes like devil horns. Her clothes had been unremarkable overalls before he’d sliced them to blood-caked rags, but her skin carries the old scars of a hardened raider. And she gives him a good view of them, coming and going, where anyone town-bred would have instinctively wrapped the bedsheet around their modesty.

He finds his wife’s old Vault suit in the bottom drawer.

“You’ll want to put this on,” he tells her. 

“Don’t know why I would.” She complies anyway, tugging the one-size-fits-none up to her waist, tying the arms there when it’s clear she’s a foot too long in the body for it. With one of his undershirts up top, she’s decent enough to avoid more than the usual gossip if any of the locals barge in with gecko bites on their ankles, and he can relax a little.

But not much. She keeps one eye on him as she prowls through his house, leaning hard on the wall and touching everything from the plunger to a bag of flour like it fell off a flying saucer and might zap her. When she flips through a medical journal back-to-front, he asks if she can make out the words.

“Some.” She runs a finger down the page. “If…it…blood….and…that…uh…”

“That’s a good start.”

She drops it on the desk with an impatient grunt. “You sound like Ruby.”

Her face twists. “Ruby? Is that right?”

“I don’t know,” he says, his heart hitching in his chest at seeing the teeth her angry grimace reveals, the canines filed to evil little points. “What do you remember about this Ruby?”

“Nothing. A flash, then gone. Heat lightening.” She shakes her head. “Didn’t mean to speak, that last bit.”

She’s hiding the panic well, but her shallow, careful breaths and blown pupils give her away. His heartbeat settles down again, and he leads her to the couch with a gentle, “Sit down, now.”

No real raider would waste energy on a calm façade, not when his laser pistol is a foot from her hand. She’s tame enough.

“Your noggin’s taken a lot of damage, and you might have trouble remembering or keeping your thoughts in a row while it heals. But there’s good chance at least some of your recollections will return, in time. Now don’t force it, but let your mind go blank. Yeah? Good. Now tell me the first thing you think of.”

She’s quiet a long time.

“Sandman. Men. In the sand, digging.”

“Sandman?” he echoes. When she struggles to form words and gives up, makes a rude gesture and taps her own forehead, he chuckles. “You’re not a fool. That’s just what we call the one who puts your lights out at night.”

“Yeah,” she nods, relieved. “That. Him.”

“Him?”

“Him.” She throws her shoulders back and lowers her voice to a deep alto. “‘I ain’t a fink. Game was rigged from the start.’ Then…” 

She stands, cocks her hip, and points a finger at the floor. “Lights out.”

The doc winces. “Of all the memories to keep, eh? The brain’s a funny thing.”

“He took…he…he kept…he kept the ferryman away?”

Doc Mitchell shakes his head. “That was a fever dream.”

“There was a lake,” she insists.

“Not within 30 miles of Goodsprings. Here, since you’re struggling, have a look at this.” He gives her what he rescued from her pockets: a 10mm handgun that was likely old before the bombs fell, a dozen caps, and a contract. “At least we know you’re a Mojave Express courier, number six on their list.”

“Six. Maybe…” She skims it without recognition. “This says…prime?”

“Primm.”

“How far?”

“Too far,” he corrects her, again. “Try a walk around town, first.”

* * *

She sticks to the road, as if the doc could see her through the midnight mile between them and slap her for disobeying.

_Tho’ don’t think he’s a hitting man, why’d he –_

Fortunately, the beast the trader spoke of has done the same, and she soon finds his tracks. The townsfolk think she’s supernatural, able within a day to tell who has strolled down the sandy main drag, how long ago and how much they’d drank. As if she was born with magic eyes. As if it wasn’t a hard-learned skill, setting those eyes to the ground and remembering – Easy Pete with his half-crippled foot that swung wider leaving Trudy’s then coming in, Sunny’s boat-wide boot soles, Trudy her own self mincing in pre-war heels worn down uneven.

_Why’s she – well she never leaves indoors – but if raiders struck, those blue bastards prowling after the boy – couldn’t run, easy prey –_

She follows the tracks even when they move into open country, keeping low so she can hunker on her haunches when the dizzy spells hit bad and the stars dance under her feet, and if she thinks of nothing but those dents in the sand and broken mesquite twigs, the ghosts come. They slip along outside her eyes’ reach, bumping her heels, whispering their names just too low to hear unless she doesn’t try to listen.

She knows this is the trail of the sick beast, the one Chet’s travelling friend warned him of, because they are bighorner tracks and they stagger lee-wise like those of that foaming ‘guai, when she was a little, and she can see one of the ghosts through the back of her head.

_Him – he – favourite uncle,_ his name lost the way she can tell is for good, but his lined face, sun-rough hair – _oh, he would slap if I didn’t listen, not the doc, but they’re close –_

And she follows that whisper as she follows the tracks, and on the way is that hunt. Favorite uncle teaches the littles because his sister is the best hunter, the one who most keeps the tribe fed, clothed and jingling with caps. When she can move without noise and track a fart along the breeze, she’ll join her mother and big brothers – but, no, barely get three seasons with her, before the deathclaws move in on their ‘lurk supply and the old woman sends her running for reinforcements while – 

No. The hunt to remember is that ‘guai, that mad thing out of Tar Walker territory, half that tribe killed or infected and their bighorners all slaughtered against the tiny demons that ran through them, a belly-clawing winter ahead for survivors who could not even eat their poisoned kin.

This ‘guai carried the same doom for them, for the…for…for their tribe, until they ran it down, boxed it in a canyon with a shallow cave, and her – her – with the bright grey eyes, one of them now bulging as the hungry thing behind it grew, eating into her mind and bringing the falling fits more and more as summer curdled into wet autumn – she sprinted toward it, howling, madness a poultice to draw out madness, and died under one swipe of its bloody paw. 

But she’d lured him out of the sheltering cave. Hunters let loose from the canyon walls above, lead racing the raindrops, and in the morning blocked up the canyon with brush soaked in rock-oil and burned them, purifying woman and animal together. After, her children claimed her spirit, imbued with a ‘guai’s wisdom and ferocity, came to them in dreams, and the tribe was careful to always speak of her bravery at the end, not the meddlesome pettiness of her healthy years.

Just in case.

The bighorner’s tracks in front of her show a drunken stagger, legs tangling and tripping it up. She can hear it bellow, but the fitful wind blows the sound around, echoing off the hills. Last time she saw this, it was from the vantage point of favourite uncle’s shoulders, but she’s sure. If the beast makes it to Goodsprings, even gets close enough to infect the local geckos, it’ll be the Tar Walkers’ fate for those silly, soft people.

Those silly, soft, stranger-saving people.

The trail loops, she sees. It has been drifting down every slope, retracing its own steps. And the bellow is closer, now, probably just over that ridge ahead.

_Get ahead of it – there – will probably pass along that log, maybe get tangled up –_

She moves into place, readying her horrible, tiny, all-but-useless pistol, a miniature thing when clasped in both hands. The bighorn lets loose another coughing bray, so close now, snuffling wetly as if it’s caught her scent. Perhaps it has.

_No, simpler than that. Madness, pulled to madness –_

She is as mad a thing as the beast. With her split-rotten head and splay-staggered thoughts, she loops and falls even when the stars stay up high where they’re meant to. They’re kin, she and it, and she thinks that can make her poultice and purifier in one.

The waning moon above shivers, then swoops, and her stomach pushes into her throat.

_No – oh no – not now – can’t do this, not with my guts in front of me – but – ”_

She makes herself still, not press her forehead to the ground until the fit passes, mentally throwing the sickness in front of her like a lasso. This is what will drawn it out, their shared demon.

It’s over so fast, a ragged string of heartbeats that skitter like a scorp’, slavering beast, foaming mouth and broken-sore skin, pistol firing again and again all by itself in her twitching hands, one of her feet jerking out from under her as the poor sick thing collapses almost on her, its wetness spraying over her face, smelling rich and sour on her lips.

Silence rings in her ears as she turns the pistol to her temple.

_Can’t carry this back with me – kill the sickness – covered in it, tasting it – tasting – tasting –_

She eases off the trigger, cautiously touches her face. She expects to feel slobbery wetness, is sure the doc’s shirt is sloppy with the thing’s blood and ichor, but her forehead and cheeks are only sweaty. Her clothes are clean. The beast lies, dead, caught in the crotch of the log across the dip between hills.

She tastes blood, her own. There’s a ragged gash inside her bottom lip shaped like her teeth. The drool on her chin came out her own slack mouth.

And (she checks the chamber to be sure) she’s out of ammo anyway.

_Suspected I’m not the hero type – good to be sure._

Doc Mitchell stands on his porch, watching oily smoke rise against the lightening horizon, dashing her plans to quietly slip back to her invalid’s cot. “Did I just waste those days I kept you from dyin’, Six?”

“No,” she says, sure of that after her night’s work, if nothing else.

“Sure seems like it to me,” he harrumphs. “Unless you’re gonna look me in the eyes and say you’ve got nothing to do with that burning out there, or those gunshots I heard?”

She looks him in the eyes and says, “I’m not gonna lie to you, doc.”

The sky shifts from violet to deep red while they stare each other down.

“Get back to bed,” the doc finally snaps. “And you’re not getting out that door again without a leash on you.”

* * *

Sunny finds the nameless courier in what’s quickly becoming their regular corner booth, fenced in by wire and metal. She’s not a friend, but she’s a hell of a shot. As the only people in town under 50 and not dodging the local crime syndicate, they’ve fallen together like two bullets in an empty sack.

On closer inspection, the table’s detritus resolves into two piles: the guts of Trudy’s busted-up radio and the clean, oiled components of her handgun.

“Metal won’t catch fire, no matter how hard you glare.”

“Can break it down,” the woman growls, “but I can’t get it back together. Makes no sense.”

“Still?” Sunny asks. “You better check that thing Doc gave you. That’s a weird skill gap for a bullet to leave.”

She checks the Pip-boy screen on her arm. “Nah. Head hasn’t gone squiggly. It’s just…just…bah.”

“I’ll do it for you. Again.”

The courier waves a sarcastic _as you please_ gesture over the table and watches over the rim of her beer bottle as Sunny quickly slides the pieces together with a few deft twists. “See?”

“With my eyes, yeah. My fingers…” She waggles the moronic digits. “It’s like they don’t want to put it back together. It’s better in pieces. Think I hate that gun.”

Sunny examines it, seeing only a battered but perfectly serviceable weapon. “Maybe it’s the one your fancypants sandman shot you with. Maybe he dropped it.”

“No. That one had a pretty handle, and filigree all along the barrel. Saw it in the moonlight.”

“Of course it did,” Sunny snorts. “Bet he only wears underpants with little hearts on them, too.”

She doesn’t laugh at the joke, only pops open her Pip-boy screen and compares its innards to those of the radio Mr Fancypants’ buddy knocked over. On her third try, she finds the broken connection and twists the wires back together, snapping the screen back into place with a smug _hmmph!_

“You’re good with that thing,” Sunny observes. “Think maybe you’re really a vault dweller, and all your friends are chin-deep in sewage waiting for you to get back with a water filtration chip?”

“Not pallid. Or squinty,” the woman disagrees, tapping the radio’s speakers.

So far, they’ve concluded that the nameless woman probably isn’t a New Reno moll, a Montana soldier of fortune, a Texarcana princess, a Legion spy, President Tandi’s evil clone, or a shapeshifting nightstalker up on two legs. She’s almost certainly exactly what she looks like, some half-feral tribal lured to the fringes of civilization by sweeter booze than can be brewed in a hollow rock, but wild speculation passes the time.

“Hmmm…ok, I got it: Gomorra girl. One of the really classy quins, back in the courtyard, with your own bouncer to throw out any deadbeat johns.”

“Not a chance!” the woman snaps.

Sunny leans back, starting an apology before the tribal can take into her with those freaky teeth.

“I feel, real strong-like,” she interrupts, “that I only fuck for free.”

Sunny chokes on her vodka, prompting Trudy to come smack her on the back a few times while that evil, wanton bitch hides a grin behind her beer.

“You ok, sweetheart? Land sakes alive, you don’t have to drink the entire bottle in one go! I’ve got plenty more to sell you when that runs out. Oh, oh my, is that sweet music I hear coming outta my little old box?”

Sunny coughs harder, ducking her head to trade smirks with the tribal. Sheesh, these crazy Goodsprings biddies…

“Know you missed your Mr New Vegas,” that sneaky stray says, voice like honey.

“I sure did!” Trudy fishes in her apron and puts a handful of caps on the table. “Here’s something for your trouble.”

The woman only stares at them, eyebrows drawing together into a thundercloud.

“Sorry, Miss Six, isn’t that enough? I’m not sure what you’d usually charge.”

Sunny clears her throat, expecting an answering smirk or eyeroll from across the table even if she isn’t quite bold enough to tell Trudy the courier insists on giving it away for free. She gets nothing but a blank stare.

“Don’t like to…to deal…with caps,” the courier replies, slowly, like she’s reading the words in real tiny print of the back of her eyeballs.

“Oh, the do make such a noise, jingling around the pockets, don’t they?” Trudy’s got them back in her apron faster than Sunny can blink. “I’ll just keep a tab at the bar for you, instead.”

The courier shrugs, still frowning like there’s more written around the inside of her skull, if she just concentrates hard enough. Sunny feels like she should step in and protect the brain-damaged savage from Trudy’s mercantile skills, but – who in the Mojave who _doesn’t like_ caps? Sunny has no idea where to even start with that.

Trudy rushes to fill the silence, anyway, before anyone has the foolish impulse to suggest the courier could just as easily dispose of those filthy caps over at Chet’s. “I kept thinking I’d seen you out in the hills after I close down the saloon, and last night I was sure of it. You were standing out in the road, just at the hill’s crest, lookin’ up at the pretty crescent moon.”

“Good hour to hunt,” the woman nods, leaving go of whatever half-thought had vexed her. “Geckos are torpid in the cool, and I’ll smell any big predators long before they see me.”

“You don’t say?” Trudy blinks. “I don’t mind telling you, it gave me a start. Seeing you, in that pale moonlight all yearning-like, I said to myself, ‘Gosh, that’s Patsy herself, right before my eyes after all these years!’”

Sunny decides to take the bait. “Patsy?”

“Oh, child, of course you know who Patsy is!” Trudy slides into the booth, bumping hips with Sunny. “As a little woman, you snuck out after midnight to leave sweet apples on the road, when your young fella was away or when he was just being slow to realise he was _your_ young fella?”

Sunny clears her throat. “No, I…sure, some of my friends may have, but I, I’m not superstitious.”

“Mm hmm,” Trudy smiles without showing her teeth. “Well, I must have been a sillier young lady than yourself. I left a small orchard on that road when my Franklin joined up with the Rangers. And superstition it might be, but he came back from every mission…until he didn’t.”

The courier looks to Sunny for an explanation. “Apples?”

“Well, they keep the doctor away,” Sunny replies, unable to resist teasing the silly old woman next to her.

Her brows scrunch together again. “Mitchell’s afraid of apples?”

“No, dear,” Trudy huffs impatiently. “Nobody’s afraid of apples. You offer them because they’re rare and tasty, hard to part with. Not going to get Patsy’s attention with some rotten old hunk of molerat!”

“Not unless Patsy’s a deathclaw,” the courier agrees, valiantly attempting to keep up with the conversation. “They love molerat.”

“Patsy was a mortal,” Trudy says, crossing her arms tightly. “She lost her man, maybe to a war, maybe to a woman, and went out walking, hoping to come across him coming back to her. She walked so long there was finally nothing left of her but the longing and the search. So if you find yourself on the road, after midnight, out in the moonlight, she’s walking with you.”

The Brahmin flop’s getting too deep for Sunny’s comfort. “I should really go clear out the springs. You coming, ‘Patsy’?”

Out in the noonday sun, Sunny chuckles. “Patsy, the Courier. Pitter-Patsy, of Green Goodsprings, scattering apple seeds everywhere she goes. And singing. Sowing apple seeds and singing.”

“I don’t want the set the world…” the courier obligingly begins, her voice cracking.

“Stop that.”

“Moonlight. Moooon.” She watches a dust devil whirl past them, drawing out the word. “No, not the moon. Stars. Moon was just there. In the way.”

Sunny checks her ammo stock and whistles for Cheyenne, who wriggles out from the shaded hollow under the porch and shakes sand out of her fur. “Did any of that make sense inside your head? Because, out here, it made none, except maybe in Brahmin.”

“Easier to move by night,” the courier replies slowly. “Off the roads, keep in line by the stars. But the moon was so bright and low, couldn’t help but look back, and…”

She looks back now, at the graveyard. “Stay here.”

Sunny ignores the order, following her to the edge of the gulch everyone in town avoids because it’s home to a million bajillion radscorpions. The courier plunges right in, ghosting along tiny rises that shouldn’t hide a rat pup, let alone six feet of crazy woman. But the ‘scorps barely twitch in her direction. She ducks into an abandoned shack that would probably collapse under a hard word and makes the return trip hauling a dirty leather bag.

Sunny backs up ahead of her, expecting an army of bugs to descend on the town. But no, just that courier, upending the bag onto Trudy’s porch.

“Uh, why do you have that Legion helmet? _And_ an NRC mantle uniform?”

“Camouflage,” the courier explains absently, digging through the pile. “Ah hah!”

Cheyenne sniffs at the beat- to-hell-and-back leather armor the courier holds up, whining at what looks like old blood.

“Stinks, I know. But I left some hides tanning by the spring, and once it’s patched up it’ll, well, smell more like gecko ass and turpentine. Probably better.”

“Camouflage?” Sunny repeats.

“Don’t mind telling you,” the crazy woman begins, imitating Trudy’s haughty drawl, “this jumpsuit binds up terrible in the crotch. Be good to have something that fits.”

“If you don’t explain something in the next five seconds, I’ll sic Cheyenne’s jaws of death on your goddamn crotch.”

She drops the armor back into the bag. “Road. Moonlight. Hell, Patsy…made me think. Made me remember.”

“Remember that you’re an NCR spy infiltrating the Legion, maybe?” Sunny interrupts. She doesn’t like the shuttered-up look of the woman’s face.

The courier points at the ‘scorp gulch. “Pulled off I-15 to rest up, change into settler-wear. Was going to run through open country, straight shot to…to…cut through the sewers into, uh, and wanted something light and quiet-looking on me. Fit in. Stalled just a minute, full moon so low and big and bright. Started north, but had to see that moon once more, and…”

She rubs the back of her head and shrugs. “They crept up on me.”

“Goddamn,” Sunny whistles. “Don’t you ever have a pretty memory come back?”

“The moon was pretty.” She stuffs the rest of the clothes into her bag and stands, dropping it over one shoulder in a move she must have made a million times. “Let’s hit the springs.”

“Patsy…” Sunny begins. She doesn’t know what she wants to say, but she needs a name to say it to. “Hey you” or “Courier” or even “Miss Six” just won’t do.

The woman smiles, her eyes narrow but dry. “Got any sweet little apples? Find you a man swingin’ a bighorn cock if you do.”

“Fuck you,” Sunny smiles back.

For once, none of the settlers are hanging out by the springs, but a half dozen chompy little monsters fill that gap in their social calendar. Sunny lets Patsy sneak up first. The woman refuses to waste bullets on the bastards and insists a machete would mar the hide. So, Sunny gets to watch her creep around with Chet’s old shovel held over her head, damn near pissing herself trying not to laugh.

She caves in two little heads, though, and distracts the rest long enough for Sunny to get a clean shot between their eyes. They skin and dress their kill, more out of habit than hunger, and set the raw meat to cook over one of the campfires by the spring. Patsy trades old hides for fresh out of her makeshift tanning pit and, using what looked like a sliver of bone and a whole mess of Doc Mitchell’s fine silk thread, begins patching up that old leather armor.

“I do enjoy hard work,” Sunny tells her, lighting a cigarette. “I could watch it all afternoon.”

“Fuck you,” Patsy replies, eyes inches from a complicated stitch.

Sunny hides a grin and tilts her face up to the sun. The stranger isn’t a friend, no, but she could certainly get used to passing the hours in company. She suspects that the newly christened “Patsy,” pausing her work to throw a scrap of tendon to Cheyenne to chew on, might feel the same.

“You still planning a run to Primm?”

“Guess so,” Patsy shrugs. “No rush. Too bad there’s no goldens ‘round here. You can make fire-fighting armor with those hides.”

She finishes and changes out of the old vault suit with a grimace of relief, twisting to test the fit.

“That…that doesn’t look like the deathclaw’s dinner I was expecting,” Sunny says. The bright blue gecko hides had tanned down to dusty grey, almost the color of the rocks behind them. Actually, with the random patterns of old brown leather and grey hide patches, she could probably lie down by the road and just pass as a rock herself, if only the lightness of raw scar tissue didn’t jump out so much from her dark, mostly bare skull.

Patsy’s already lost interest in her work, jerking her chin toward the road. “You know him?”

Sunny looks over her shoulder to see some waster lurking by the old caravan, probably hoping one of them would get naked again. “No. Just some creep, probably.”

He takes their glances as an invitation and shambles into the campsite. “You ladies gotta help me. My girl, she’s trapped up on that ridge. She fell into a nest of geckos and they’re gonna eat her alive if you don’t save her!”

Cheyenne growls low in her chest, hackles up. Sunny rubs behind her ears and tells her to be still. She’d take it as a bad sign, if the dog didn’t react the exact same way to every new face. She’s tempted to anyway, given the man’s twitchy hands and shifty eyes.

Hell with it. He’s not a local, but keeping the springs clear of pests is her job.

Patsy cocks her head. “Why’d you come from the road, then?”

Sunny’s already on her feet, half-listening for the man to say he got turned around fleeing, that he hadn’t been sure he could trust them and circled around, or maybe that his friend had gone up without him. Her ears prick up when he only pauses before repeating his plea word for word.

“C’mon,” she says before Patsy can ask again. The courier puts her hands on her hips like she’s going to refuse. “We should clean out that nest before they move down to the springs, anyway.”

Sunny’s ready to argue, but the courier picks up her shovel and old pistol without a murmur against it. “Just point me at ‘em.”

It’s a damn tough fight. This late in the season, the younglings are all but full grown, soft baby teeth hardened to serrated razors. Patsy drops the shovel after one rips a bite out of her shoulder while its siblings dogpile up to her waist. Sunny can’t help her right now, not if she wants to get through this with her kneecaps still attached and Cheyenne in one piece, but she’s not needed. Thirty seconds and half a clip later, Patsy’s attackers are so much cooling meat among the broc flowers. As Sunny finishes off the last two before they can escape over the ridge, she wonders why the courier even bothers fumbling with her makeshift club when she can shoot like that.

They reach the top, find a mattress and bear traps (very nearly discovering those the hard way), but no girl.

“Huh, you think she – ” 

Sunny turns, but Patsy’s no longer behind her. She can’t see her anywhere, in fact, even though she heard her muttering something about a “son of a gway” just a moment before. What she does see is the waster, racing up the hillside to find his girl.

With his pistol drawn.

Before Sunny can point hers – just to be on the safe side – a dusty rock stands up behind the creep and it’s Patsy, coolly popping two in the base of his skull.

He rolls downhill, coming to rest against the pile of gecko corpses.

“What the hell?” Sunny cries.

Patsy looks up from stripping the body, surprised. “Came to kill us. Killed him first.”

She jerks her chin at the mattress, which Sunny sees now is stuffed with ammo and caps, some scavenger’s life savings. “You think he was just using us? How do you know this wasn’t his?”

“Found this hideaway last week.” Patsy settles the man’s estate in a little heap and sets to work in the gecko carcasses with the same matter-of-fact efficiency. “Was a four-eyed sharpster who took a potshot at me then, not him.”

“So you knew from the start he was moonshining us? Then why the hell’d you trot along instead of saying something?”

Patsy pauses to rub a splatter of gecko gore from her cheek with a clean forearm. “Would have missed out on a hunt if I had.”

She rips the skin from the carcass with one hard yank.

“Okay…” Sunny calls finders keepers and helps herself to the mattress bounty, whispering a _vaya con dios_ for the unknown scavenger-cum-gecko-chow. “I guess that makes sense. Of a sort. But damn if I’m not sick to my gizzard of Goodsprings being overrun by gun-waving assholes!”

Patsy grunts in agreement, wrapping meat up in raw hides. It would be good to kill something, that was what she’d thought, and the clarity of it had pushed the man’s oily smell and pea-shooter eyes to the side. For that moment.

But the words won’t line up.

Doc tells her they’ll do that, do that until they won’t any more. The dizzy fits have passed, a good sign he says. The madness is passing. Maybe.

Breathe, she thinks, and sets her mind to air-in air-out while her hands do what they do without her split-peach brain telling them how and it would be nice if her mouth could – 

“Can kill them, too.”

Sunny is making that face she nearly always makes, and she is annoyed. Not at Sunny, at the words, that they jump out her lips as soon as they come together right.

No, annoyed at Sunny too. Why not kill them?

“That’s not how we do things here. And, even if we did, you and I’d be so much sun-cooked meat if we tried. Better we figure out how to spirit Ringo away without being seen.”

Maybe.

Maybe not.

She could, easily, could walk right down the road under a full moon and the gangers’d never see her, but the trader manchild…

“Better we don’t risk spoiling the pleasing smoothness of those features.”

“Patsy, I swear to all the gods ever, I will stake you outside the deathclaw caves covered in applesauce if you try to matchmake us again.”

Sunny appreciates nothing of the courier except live ammo rammed hotly into her enemies. The pretty trader and she, they make sick-brahmin eyes at each other’s backs, but speak only of trivial things: food, escape. Foolish townies.

“And, just for the future, ‘free of obvious mutation’ is no way to talk a friend up to a handsome fella, anyway!”

Don’t roll eyes, she tells herself. Dealing with Sunny requires too much forbearance, sometimes. “A rare quality, even in towns. Should know your own value.”

“Keep talking, deathclaw bait.”

Sure, remind the deathclaw clan there’s nice soft human flesh over the road, no teeth or claws but lead and steel, and not even that if caught off guard. She’ll never understand townies. Cooking fires everywhere, put on armor only to fight each other, stroll through open country like big “oh kill me now” beacons with only a varmint rifle or laser pistol on hand.

They’re all mad.

There’s a hole in my mind, but they’re really mad.

“Me and Cheyenne are heading back to town, Patsy. You coming?”

“No.” The smell of horsenettle is on the wind, strong as molerat musk. How doesn’t Sunny notice it? Such useful seeds, for tanning or poisons; she’s not going to pass up the chance to stock up.

“I can stop calling you Patsy, if that’s what’s jammed a cactus up your cooch. It’s just a joke.”

If this, then that. It’s all she has to stuff in that empty place so the rest doesn’t cave in. If these wires work, twisting those to match will make them work too. If this person gives aid, then aid them in return. If the thing in Trudy’s mind called “Patsy” walks the midnight road, then she is a Patsy.

“I know, you’re probably got some real tribal name, like, uh, ‘Two-Gun Mailman’ or ‘Turd Blossom’ or something else with some deep meaning behind it, and Patsy’s not something I’d ever expect someone like you to – ”

“’Walks in Moonlight’?” the courier interrupts. “Sounds tribal enough.”

She keeps a stern face until Sunny socks her shoulder and declares her a bigger pain in the ass than Chet’s experimental saguaro toilet paper. They part peaceably and Patsy climbs the high ridge over town, stuffing her travel bag with the seeds. She is caught between using up the last can of turpentine on a batch of poison or curing today’s hides when she spies the plague of Powder Gangers lurking behind Victor’s shack.

They’re too far away to hear, but their grouping and gestures are clear – the big one, what’s-his-nuts, pepping up the rest. They can take this town, yeah! They’re outnumbered five-to-one, but that’s five trembly-aiming old people to every one big strong Powder Man!

She makes her way back to the tanning pit and sacrifices the last of her turpentine to the valuable hides.

As the sun goes down, she lurches into Chet’s store under a load of good leather and asks if he has anything to silence her stupid little pistol and, oh yeah, every scrap of 10mm ammo he’s got.

Trudy stumbles over the bodies on her way into the saloon the next morning, three of them neatly dead by a single headshot, but two of them riddled and sliced, blood splashed all across the street. Her heart thumps and lurches so at the shock that she hurries in to the Doc’s, only to find him putting a final stim into the gore-splattered stranger, the wild woman it’s so cute to call Patsy now.

She nods casually at Trudy as she leaves, scratching under her filthy armor, and the older woman faints in the doorway.

Sunny finds her friend later, dozing in the old trailer she’s taken over since Doc pronounced her “well enough and getting on my nerves.” She knocks on the aluminium frame.

“Hey, Patsy?”

“Mmnnnuh? Yeah, what?”

Sunny shifts her feet and clears her throat. “We’re all really glad you…did what you did. It maybe saved the town. And Ringo ‘specially said that he owes you big. But…you’re obviously all…healed up now. And…well, Goodsprings is a real small town…and you’re kinda big for it…y’know?”

Patsy takes this in silently, finally nodding.

“I need to get to Primm. See how much trouble I’m in.” She throws her few things into the dirty travel bag and stands, packed up in moments. “Can’t hide here forever.”

Something in Sunny’s chest twists when Patsy carefully puts on an old hat that Doc Mitchell used to wear for weddings and christenings, back when Goodsprings had such things. “You’re always welcome to swing back around.”

“Yeah.”

It’d be so much easier if she argued!

“I got your caps off Trudy. Harder than getting some nasty dead thing away from Cheyenne once she’s got her teeth set, but I managed.”

Patsy shakes her head. “I told her – ”

“You hate caps, yeah, it’s the talk of the town. Er, it would be, if not for…anyway. So I took those caps and got Chet to put a silencer and a night-vision sight on my old varmint rifle.”

She shrugs the gun off her shoulder and shoves it into Patsy’s stiff hands. She turns it over sullenly, holding out a whole three seconds before planting it in her shoulder and scanning the distant ridge.

“And I want that back in one piece!” Sunny tells her, turning away before the hitch in her throat can grow roots.

“See you ‘round,” the courier calls after her, and sneaks out of town the back way.


	2. Primm

_Too many guns, too little sleep, and no brains among ‘em_ , Ruby thinks just after that savage kicks her way inside Vicky & Vance’s front door, hauling a load half again as large as herself. The blast of high noon light blinds Primm’s survivors, and they raise their pieces pointing every which-a-way. Ruby can just about hear the squeak of two dozen trigger springs when her damn fool husband screams.

“You! You’re fired, gods damn it! And that’s not yours – and neither is that!”

He flicks his semi-automatic first at the wreck of an eyebot stuffed under the savage’s arm, then at the little 10mm in her hand, which whips up to poke his nose.

They’ll take the girl out, Ruby’s sure, but it’ll cost them a hell of a lot. Johnson first. She steps between them before the bullets can fly. “Land sakes, Johnson, let her have them!”

Four furious eyes land on her. _Better me than each other_.

The savage looks worse than the last time she staggered into the office, bloody all down one leg instead of just the whites of her eyes, stinking of gunpowder, not whiskey and the Jet-sweats. 

“They’re all dead,” she snarls, and coughs. “You can quit cowering now.”

“Hello!” Deputy Beagle’s managed to slide in behind her and puts lie to her declaration by clumsily slamming the doors shut and bracing himself against them. “Yes, it’s true, this little lady did help me thrash the miscreants outside and in the Bill’s ballroom, but I fear the floors above are still infested with the cowards. Crack shots, some of ‘em. Lying low is still the better part of our valour.”

He slumps, mouth hanging wide, and when he pitches forward, Ruby’s sun-blind eyes find the ugly exit wound in his back, low and ragged, the splatter of blood left on the door and spreading around him.

The savage crouches, gun still on Johnson, and touches the deputy’s neck. “Shit.”

Silence falls, oppressive as the stale smell of a week’s Mexican standoff. Beagle wasn’t popular, exactly, but he was a regular at the bar in back. Ruby hears a sniffle or two behind her.

“Shit,” Johnson echoes, Beagle’s loose wrist between his fingers. “Bad to worse.”

He sets his semi on a slot machine and grabs the former deputy by one arm and one leg, butts the door open, and hauls the body out to the sidewalk. The savage steps around him carefully as he secures the entrance behind him, treading in the thick smear of blood.

“Someone clean this up!” he orders, voice cracking.

“Sit, the both of you, before you fall down,” Ruby orders, herself.

The savage moves before Johnson, bloody leg trembling, settling the wrecked eyebot on the table before carefully lowering herself into a seat behind it. She glares at Johnson until the old man, flicking a glance at his wife, is shamed into joining her. Ruby takes the third seat and pretends little Jake Babor isn’t using an old shirt to mop up the last of Primm’s law and order behind them.

“Well, isn’t this nice?” she cracks, as her hands start to shake.

Glares all around. Ruby lets them hairy-eyeball each other and tries to remember how to breathe. It feels like years since she’s tasted a clean breeze, through a cigarette, passing the time of day with the Sheriff’s wife outside the Express office. They’ll have to bury her, and her husband…Beagle…who can say how many others, when this is through.

The savage stares at them both with her forehead crinkled up deep, like they were a tough math problem that went higher than her fingers and toes. Once the blood’s been mostly cleared and the silence has gone on long enough that the others have returned to pacing the walls and slicing the odd bullet into suspicious shadows, she fishes a rag-wrapped bundle out of her bag and slides it across the table.

Ruby unwraps it, expecting maybe the package never delivered, maybe a baby’s head, and finds a radscorp’s poison gland.

“Well, child…” she says, surprised.

The savage nods. “You Ruby?”

* * *

_It’s all over but the crying_ , Ruby’s mother used to say, and Ruby never understood until her first time a’childbed, or the first ranch hand she patched up knowing that bull had kicked too hard, too deep. Life in the Mojave brought that saying to mind nearly every day.

Johnson screams now, but his gun is by the door, and the other survivors barely turn their heads to listen. So some package has gone missing, someone’ll have to pay it off, so what? They could all die any second here, soon as the Powder Gangers outside realise where the real caps are hidden. But no one at their little table is getting shot today. It’s all over but her lovable ass of a husband exercising his giant yap.

“You know how much we were paid for these six deliveries? You know how much we’re liable for since you waltzed off and lost yours? Not one, missy, all six! Because yours was the only important one, somehow. If I’d know that, I woulda given it to Bill, or George, or that goddamn blasted ‘bot here, anyone but you!”

“It was an ambush,” the savage shrugs. “Well planned. They killed and buried me for that package. They’d have gotten Bill or George, too.”

“Yeah, it’s always an ambush with you,” Johnson snorts. “You never just cut and run.”

Her leg is propped up on the last chair, armour cut open up to the crotch, high on a string of Med-X jabs. She’s dug two bullets out of her thigh and has moved on to picking fragments out of her churned-meat knee, two stimpacks clenched in her teeth, drooling a little as she mutters around them.

“And you know who we owe? You know who, out of every rad-blasted bastard in the Mojave you made us an enemy of?” He leans forward and whispers: “House.”

The savage pauses, taking in the gravity of the situation. “Who?”

Johnson thumps the table with both hands. “I give up. You’re a fool, girl, a damned waste of my time and trust. You always were, and you always will be, and you owe me more caps than you can ever make in deliveries, trade, or on your goddamn back for all I care. You shoulda stayed in that grave, little saint.”

Ruby clears her throat and watches the savage from the corner of her eye, but she only stabs the stimpacks into her leg, satisfied with her meatball surgery. She fishes a bag of tribal itching powder out of her pack and rubs that into the wounds before the stims can start to re-grow any skin, strangely thick, slightly numb skin. The powder will do that job more slowly, more painfully, but it’ll be regular old flesh in the end.

“Saint,” she echoes while she finishes, half a question.

“Yeah…” Johnson replies warily, sharing a look with Ruby. The savage had always insisted she had no name, had never earned one, so they’d put the name of her tribe on her contract. It was that or “Jane Doe,” and Mojave Express’d already had one of them.

She shrugs again. “Saints rise, don’t they?”

“You’d know,” Johnson snorts in disgust and gets up from the table. He stops next to the door and points at the stains little Jake Babor couldn’t quite erase. “You even got our Deputy killed. He wasn’t much, but he was the only law we had left. You owe us another goddamn Sheriff, or I’ll stake the bounty on your head myself.”

Ruby catches his eye, lets a raised eyebrow make her point.

“I’ll bring you some law, you old buzzard.” The savage rucks what’s left of her armour around her leg and works a brace up over her raw knee to hold it all together, leather and flesh. “After I heal up a spell.”

Johnson shakes his head and rubs his eyes, like he just might be fixing to cry a little over that damn fool Beagle, before taking up his gun at the front entrance again.

The savage ignores him, turning her attention to the ‘bot. She leaves smears of her own blood wherever she touches it. “Where’d you get this little guy?”

Ruby swallows a few times to work some spit onto her cotton-dry tongue. “One of the boys found it out in the desert,” she finally croaks. “Johnson had a plan to get it running, maybe use it for some of the milk runs between Goodsprings and Nipton. Never got around to tinkering with it.”

She finds a hatch near the lower antenna and pops it open, loosing a brief shower of wires and scrap to the table, which she stares at thoughtfully.

“I think we got a Dean’s Electronics in the cashier’s cage,” Ruby volunteers. “You want a Sarsaparilla?”

They work through the trickier chapters together, Ruby sounding out the longer words and the savage comparing schematics to the inside of that Pip-Boy she’s picked up somewhere. Ruby doesn’t ask who died to get her that. She asks how many Gangers are left outside.

“Enough.” She picks out frayed wires and compares them to a handful from her pack, replacing a few that seem close to the same width. Girl’s always been a scavenge rat, carrying in all sorts of flotsam to trade with Johnson, who usually found a use for it. “There’s an NCR camp across the highway. Said they’d be happy to take over and clear out the convicts.”

“No,” Ruby replies. “Primm’s independent. NCR taxes and regulations would kill the town.”

“It’s law.”

“Not our law,” Ruby insists. “You want to keep your idiot promise to my husband, you’ll have to go a bit further. Hell, Slim over there would be better law than the damn NCR.”

“No, he damn well wouldn’t!” Johnson calls over.

“You mind your business!” Ruby shoots back.

The savage rolls her eyes and rubs the scar cleaving her forehead.

“It pain you much?” Ruby asks.

“Some,” the savage admits, fiddling with her Pip-Boy until it shows a body schematic. “Makes the room shivery sometimes. Just got to wait it out. Doc Mitchell says it’ll heal up in time, or not at all.”

Ruby lets the silence stretch before offering, “I’m sorry for your misfortune, girl. You seem to attract more than most.”

“Patsy.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Patsy now, not ‘girl’.”

“Oh.” The name reminds Ruby of life back West, pretty dresses and sweet applejack, not the long, bald spike of cactus needle bleeding puddles on her floor. “Where’d you pick that up?”

“Goodsprings,” the savage tells her, and clarifies: “Trudy.”

Oh, Trudy. Trust that doddy spinster to hang a name like Patsy on a rawhide killer.

“What came before?” The sav–Patsy asks abruptly.

“Before what?”

Patsy waves a wrench at the scene around them. “Before the Gangers. Before that, even.” She touches her forehead again. “It’s all jumbled up. I walk the roads, see a place and remember what it’s called, maybe some of what I knew about it before. But I can’t just kick the door open and find what I want to know.”

Ruby thinks while Patsy tries to force a conductor into a space that looks like it should fit, but doesn’t quite. Hell, what could the girl want to know? How she rolled into town near on a decade past with game and fruit to trade, skinny and bright-eyed as a roadrunner, when Johnson was shorthanded and had nearly set his mind to make the Nipton run himself, gimpy knees or no?

How she ran the circuit, most of the time, carrying packages from drop-off boxes and whatever was handed to her on the way, only coming into the office when she was so loaded down with caps she jangled with every step? How Johnson kept back fancy guns and special ammo, knowing the saint would always take them in lieu of pay, only to leave most of them in her office locker?

How she couldn’t read a whit at first, only memorise the shapes of names? Ruby’d tried to remedy that, letting her work through the precious picture books that generations of Nashes had teethed on. The savage had handled them like fragile animals, ones that might bite if squeezed.

Instead, she begins: “Things went bad last year. You’d had Johnson hold your pay for ages, building up a fine nest egg. I suspected a man was involved, there, but you never said. Sure smiled a a lot, though.

“Then Caesar wrecked the Divide, and you had to carry the Van Graff payroll by the regular road. You said your Van Graff guard was in on it, that she’d whistled out when you wanted to go around a suspicious stretch of road, but since they’d killed her, too… Well.

“You ran and you lived. And you saddled us with a hell of a debt to the Van Graffs. That back pay, all those guns in your locker, that didn’t even clear a third of it. You’re damn lucky Johnson kept you on at all after that, lent you one of his own guns, let you work it off. Not that you appreciated that trust, not a damn bit.”

She sniffs and softens her tone. “Still, no matter how bad it got, you always brought us meat you’d shot on the road, and ‘scorp glands for my casseroles.”

The girl is quiet, eyes on her work. “Because I loved you both, a little. Remember that now.”

“Try this instead.” Ruby hands her a sensor module and clears her throat. “Well, love is love, and business is business, and when they get to stepping on each other’s feet, one’s got to move out.”

Neither of them has much to say after that.

Another hour passes with little more than half-sentence murmurs over the Dean’s read-soft pages. Finally, somehow, it all fits together, more or less, and Patsy holds the ‘bot steady while Ruby hammers a piece of scrap metal flat over the entrance wound, then flicks the thing on.

With the snap of a few sparks, a quick whiff of ozone, the little ‘bot whooshes to life. It hovers over their table and turns to Patsy, antenna blazing with loose electricity.

She only grins and reaches up to pat its casing. “Hi!”

It beeps, almost like it heard her, like it returns the greeting. _Hell_ , Ruby thinks, remembering Brahmin calves who forever followed the human who yanked them into this world. _This can’t end well._

“You got it working!” Johnson booms and reaches for the ‘bot himself. “I owe you a few caps for that.”

It turns on him, pootling backwards to hover over the savage’s shoulder, and Ruby realises that the lower antenna is nothing of the sort as it heats up and sparks.

“Dearest,” she warns, “leave it be.”

Johnson’s frozen anyway, staring at the menacing…menacing…

_For the love of…did the builders actually intend to give the thing a deadly penis?_ Ruby stands carefully and moves between her darling husband and certain death for the second time since breakfast. “If she’s going to go in after the Sheriff, she’ll need backup, right?”

Johnson lowers his reaching hand. Carefully.

“Keep it,” he agrees. “I’ll add it to your tab.”

The savage only snorts and checks her leg, standing slowly until she’s sure it’ll hold her weight. She asks, “So where do I find the law you’d rather have?”

Ruby jumps in before Johnson can jam his foot in it again. “To the north. NCR Correctional Facility.”

Patsy tilts her head in wry confusion. “Don’t you already have plenty a them here?”

“Fella named Meyers,” Johnson clarifies. “Heard he was a sheriff out west, a bit too rough and ready for those glad-handing bedfellas to sleep sound next to. Sounds perfect for Primm.”

Patsy touches her scar again. “You want me to break into Powder Ganger HQ and come out with a lawman? Need any Holy Grails while I’m out, too?”

Johnson lifts his nose. “Fine, girl. Not like we expected you to keep a promise.”

Ruby starts to edge between them again, wondering if she can get custody of the Express couriers in the divorce.

“Here. Keep your charity.” The girl throws the little 10mm at him instead of blowing his eyebrows north and pulls an old varmint rifle from her pack. Someone in the back of the room laughs. “I’ll need a longer-range scope to fit this. Maybe an extended mag, too.”

“It’ll cost you,” Johnson says.

She hefts her pack of dead men’s things. “Always does.”

* * *

Boxcars works his way up the far side of the hills, slow and careful so none of these fucking rocks can crumble under his feet, give away his position, give away his status as a living man walking the fucking earth. He’s gonna kill Eddie for shoving him out the gate, saying he’d better come back with the sniper’s head or missing his own.

How the fuck is Boxcars gonna come back without a head, huh? Eddie think he’s so sneaky he’s got his brain hidden in his ass? Fuck, Eddie’s the one with his brain up his ass, so small it’d fit without a greasin’.

Two days a this shit, days _and_ nights, plink plink plink. Walk across the exercise yard, plink, fuck! There’s your eye. Step out the gate for a piss, plink, there’s your dick looking at ya from the ground like your mamma when she caught you jacking cigarettes out her stash.

Plink, plink, plink. No one dead, but 12 men hurting, and no one with the fucking balls to look out a window. And Boxcars, fucking Boxcars, he’s gotta do the looking, he’s gotta open his fucking mouth and say, hey, the sun’s reflecting off their scope, boys, they’re right up there!

And that’s Boxcars, out the fucking gate. You seen it, you kill it.

Fuck.

He takes his time. Let those cocksuckers get it long and hard. He’s in no goddamn rush on their account.

He’s got the drop on her – fuck, it’s a cunt! Boxcars’s gonna have himself a little fun, well-fucking-earned recreation, before he blows her head off.

She’s lying on a bedroll, behind some rocks the same color as her, open box of Sugar Bombs and a bottle a good clear water next to her. He can see her breathe, but she doesn’t move in the ten minutes he sits watching her, aside from squeezing off another shot. Someone’s sharp cry of agony makes her smile.

Maybe he’ll have himself that fun after he caps her. Safer.

He sidles into position, carefully downwind, and aims his .22 at the bump of her spine peeking out at the back of her armour. Maybe if he paralyses her first…

Then he drops the fucking gun as a blast of music pops one eardrum.

_Ralphie?_ he thinks. Goddamn if it isn’t the Ralphie theme, that stupid old holoshow Sam Cooke found in Vault 19 archives and watched over and over until Boxcars had the shits of it and defected back to the Facility, and – goddamn! – if that isn’t a Ralphie-bot at his shoulder, the sparks off his laser blaster singeing Boxcars’ hair.

“You took your damn time,” the cunt says, and takes another shot, smiles again.

Boxcars prays it hit Eddie. “Didn’t know we had a date to keep,” he sneers.

She sits, careful to keep her body completely shielded from below by those rocks, and gulps the last of her water. “I been up here for two days, flashing ‘come get me’ in sunlight and moonlight. That’s too long to spend alone with the shit I don’t want to be remembering. And I got to piss like a Brahmin.”

“I ain’t stopping ya,” Boxcars sniffs.

“I think you know, if you move, my friend here will fry your brain like an egg.” She pauses. “Then I’ll have him cook what’s left a you. Damn tired of 200-year-old vittles.”

She offers him the Sugar Bombs. Boxcars keeps still, and she shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

“What the hell you want, lady? We ain’t done nothing to you!”

“You tried to kill an entire town of my friends,” she replies. “Twice.”

“Oh.” Boxcars tilts his head as far back as he dares. “Sounds like us. Fuck you anyway. Should have died with them.”

“Lotta people telling me that lately.” She tips the Sugar Bombs into her mouth and talks while she chews, flakes falling down her chin. “Know a con named Meyers?”

“That grizzled old fuck?” Bastard was always telling everybody they could do better. Could put in their time and come out fine fucking citizens. If it wasn’t for a mean uppercut and the look like he knows every way to make a man bleed, he’d have been cellblock bitch years ago. “Shit you want with him?”

“Never you mind. Just send him up.” She crushes the empty cereal box and throws it in the air. Ralphie zaps it to dust on the wing and beeps like it’s Christmas. “I don’t see him by nightfall, you’ll all die in fire.”

“Fuck you.” His ear’s bleeding, dribbling down his fucking jaw.

She waves him off and settles back on her bedroll. “Quickly now. I’ll give you a fifteen-minute head start if you scamper.”

He kicks half the hills down with him, rocks rolling behind as he sprints home. Time to move the fuck on again, he decides. Send up that old do-right fuck, break the caps outta Eddie’s desk, then get him some nice quiet R’n’R in Nipton.

Boxcars fucking deserves it.

 

* * *

Meyers approaches with his hands high. The setting sun’s in his eyes, so he can’t see who’s called him out. A woman, that boy said. Well, “blazing bitch-cunt and cocksucking Ralphie” was what he’d said, but Meyers has grown fluent in con-speak.

His wife? He can’t imagine she’d bother. The divorce papers had been through the bars before he was formally sentenced. His daughters, they’d be grown now, but they don’t even write.

“Hello?” he calls cautiously.

“Come up behind the ridge,” a strange voice calls out. “There’s a path to your right.”

Meyers complies, still surrendering even as his hands start to tingle. “Have I done you some harm?”

It’s no one he knows, a tall raider who looks to have travelled a bloody road, rolling up a bedroll. She pauses, looks at him quizzically. “None I know of. Hold this.”

He takes the bedroll and holds it tight while she ties a much-knotted cord around it. He nearly drops it when an eyebot whirls around the ridge and blasts a few dramatic chords. The woman holds up her hand.

“No, Eddie. This one’s ok. You keep our perimeter tight.”

“Oh, _Ralphie_ ,” Meyers breathes. “Well, that makes sense now, at least.”

She takes the bedroll and tucks it into the straps of her pack. “If you say so. Let’s get moving. We can make it before midnight if we shake some dust now.”

“Lady…” He scratches the back of his neck. “Ma’am? Where? 

She shoulders the pack, which doesn’t look very heavy. “Primm.”

_Primm?_ “Can’t we just talk out whatever problem you’ve got with me here?”

“There’s no problem.” She starts down the path, whistling for her eyebot. “Primm needs a sheriff. You’re the closest sheriff. So you’re moving in.”

“Ma’am, no.” Meyers follows her, almost grabs her arm before the last two days, the blood in the courtyard, comes to mind. “I can’t leave. I got a sentence to serve out.”

“You’re paroled. C’mon.”

“Now, look here.” He moves to block her way and holds up his hands in what he fervently hopes is a peaceful gesture nonetheless indicating the two of them are going nowhere, just this second. “No one made me any job offer. I’ve never been to Primm. If I go now, I’ll be a wanted fugitive like those Powder Gangers. Maybe I made the law move a little too fast for some’s taste, but I’ve never broken it. And I’m not starting tonight.”

She rubs her face, looking very much like an ill woman who’s gone several days without any sleep. “You don’t actually have a choice,” she says through her fingers.

It’s not that he wants to go back into that stinking prison. Whoever this crazy woman is, he’d rather spend the next five years with good behaviour following her through the wastes than trading blowjobs for smokes and sharpening shivs out of Cram can lids.

It’s a matter of principle. His highest principle tonight is not adding a lifetime of years to his allotted stretch in that hole through jailbreak, voluntary or no.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he tells her. “You get me an NCR pardon, and I’m all yours. I’ll be the best damn sheriff Primm’s ever had. Deal?”

“Here’s the deal. You come with me and take a cushy job pushing around a few dozen cowards.” She unholsters her rifle. “Or I shoot you in the stomach and leave you here. Geckos or gut-rot get you first, I don’t care.”

The desert wind blows through them, carrying the last scraps of the day’s heat. In a couple of hours, it will shiver their bones.

Meyers nods toward the road ahead. “Job come with a hat?”

“Black or white,” she replies, pointing her attention, and the rifle, at the darkness ahead. “Your call.”


	3. Crater

She sits on a rock, in the sun, and thinks: _Maddogs and englishmen._

Her ears ring. Not far away, an abandoned campsite burns. A cap’s ridges dig into the skin of her palm.

_Maddogs and englishmen._

ED-E builds itself. It once again supplements its simple base programming of WAIT – FOLLOW – ATTACK – RETREAT – DELIVER as it was programmed to do so long ago by Dr Whitley. It becomes what its user needs. 

ED-E has calculated her maximum sniping range and added that data to his subroutines, a smaller circle within his sensors’ radius. It has hacked – politely – into her Pip-boy and developed behaviour sets corresponding to her cyclical medical states. It calculates routes using the Pip-boy’s map, using the reminders she’s recorded, using her direct verbal orders least of all.

Analysing the data it records during their first week together, ED-E quickly categorises this user as one to be worked around more than with. If wires and code could be conceived to have preferences, ED-E would be pleased. This user requires it to develop independent subroutines, ones which allow for overriding external orders.

If it could be, ED-E would be very pleased indeed.

_Maddogs and englishmen._ The words rattle around her otherwise spotless skull. They tickle like a loose thread. _Maddogs and englishmen._

ED-E hovers around her, the pootling rhythm of his erratic anti-grav unit artificial and soothing. After a number of passes, she recognises the movement, sees the perimeter he has set as secure. She lifts a hand to shade her eyes, and feels the sharpness of thin, cheap metal clutched too tightly.

_Maddogs and -_ The thread snaps. _Heat stroke._

ED-E absorbs an update from Pip-boy, noting that rest has significantly improved the concussion damage caused by an exploding demolition cache, itself caused by a stay hit from ED-E’s offensive blaster after the user had evaluated the campsite’s weather-damaged dynamite as too unstable for transport and moved on.

ED-E does not add this episode to its analysis file. Its targeting algorithm requires calibration. Lack of calibration and all resulting incidents are tagged “user error.” Not ED-E’s error.

She pockets the blue-starred cap and stands, twisting to stretch her stiff hips. She remembers Great Grandmother grumbling a healing incantation, her broken-leather hands rubbing a damp cloth over an exhausted body with the impersonal gentleness of a dozen generations’ nursing. She doesn’t remember how she came to settle on that exposed rock, drying to human-shaped jerky, and it doesn’t occur to her that she should. 

Her body knows that lost time, waking in the sun half-dressed and aching, sweating out whatever she put in her body the night before, is business as usual. Her hand reaches into her half-empty pack – most everything of value handed to the bastard Nash as fractional payment on her debt – and brings out water and a wide-billed merchant’s hat to cover her head. She sees the burning campsite, dismissing it without question, and settles in the scrap of shade against a high rock to sip her water. The Doc’s Pip-boy shows a figure with a wavery head, but it often does before she eats or sleeps, when she remembers either. Another screen shows a list she doesn’t bother to puzzle out, flicking the speaker on so it can read her own voice back to her.

“Primm soldiers said the Outpost honcho can maybe help with Meyer’s pardon.” A click, and the next line is highlighted. “Sandman’s probably taking the long route to Vegas, maybe pick up his trail in Novac.” Another click. “What the fuck is with that cowboy robot?” Click.

She toggles it off and lets her eyes close, thinks to doze away the worst of the afternoon with Sunny’s rifle propped across her lap, knowing her boy ED-E will warn her before any threat can come close.

ED-E watches distant feral ghouls shamble in and out of its user’s sniping range. When her vitals were higher, it ran them down and she’d followed, cursing it but laughing, also, and patting its casing when it reduced a radscorpion to glowing dust. It waits for her vitals to rise to that level again so that it can resume their mission and once again receive its user’s approval. 

It expands its patrol perimeter in increments as its shadow moves out from underneath it, weighing the distance of potential threats against the user’s half-starved exhaustion until the drink and light nap have left her acceptably fit for battle.

She scrambles to her feet as she wakes, jolted back to life by ED-E’s war cry. Her pack is over one shoulder and rifle raised to the other in moments as she looks for him, already knowing from the tinny sound that he’s out of range, over the low ridge. She’d opt for stealth and move around that barrier with care, but she thinks it likely he’s been drawn away and ambushed by enterprising prospectors, reduced to scrap even as she runs and hoists herself up over the ridge.

She tumbles back over a heartbeat later, rolling several feet down the hill before she can get to her feet and run.

ED-E catches up easily, keeping pace at her shoulder, his burble fast and worried. Relief still percolates in her chest that her fear was unfounded even as hell follows with them, flinging sticky balls of radioactive she-doesn’t-want-to-know-what. The two Reavers ED-E accidentally flushed out are close enough to crisp the back of her neck, their gasping growls tickling her ears.

She can’t kill them, not with a little varmint rifle, not without a secure high blind and half her weight in bullets. She’s never tried. Even regular ferals she detours around, if she can, as mostly harmless and a waste of bullets. And she can’t outrun them, not with her lungs already bunching up in her throat. She tries to ignore their burning and stretches her legs, aiming to make each stride twice as long, trying to remember if ghouls can usually climb, or jump…

Lesser ferals join the chase, for the thrill she guesses, since Reavers aren’t going to leave a scrap for anything else to eat. ED-E flips to fly backwards at the same pace, taking potshots at the smaller predators. She hopes he’s picking some off but doesn’t look back.

She races back over ground she doesn’t remember covering with ED-E, catching sight of a Highway Patrol building she doesn’t remember going off the road to avoid. She sees that its roof is almost level with the ridge she’s racing along, back several feet of empty space, and throws everything she’s got left into a last frantic sprint. She’ll worry about standing siege once she’s on that roof and the Reaver pack –Eldritch willing – are stuck below. If she can make the jump…

Too late, she sees the raiders patrolling in front and some long-buried human impulse has her waste breath on a scream of warning. The three she can see scramble to cover as the Reavers split their attention between her and them, flinging radioactive muck a terrifying distance. She loses sight of them as she races to the edge…gathers herself…leaps, legs churning empty space…

It knocks the wind out of her, slamming hard into the corner of the roof, but she gets a grip as she futilely gasps, pulls herself onto the hellfire-hot tarpaper tiles and rolls to the center.

The abrupt lack of engine rattle strikes her before she can get a breath in: ED-E’s dropped away.

ED-E’s antigrav unit is also in need of a good calibration. While not designed to hover higher than a tall individual’s head, it can be overclocked to push to twice that for brief stretches, in extreme situations such as hot pursuit through inconsistent ground. Instead, ED-E hits the ridge and satisfies itself that the user is temporarily safe even as it plunges ten feet lower, one of the Reavers banging it with a shin as he fails to replicate the jump. Unfortunately, this leaves it well within their reach, and they now seem even angrier than when it first began plinking them with laser blasts, luring them toward the user.

ED-E notes the human targets several yards away, hiding behind a long-dead patrol car, and calculates their likely value to the user. Reaching a sufficiently low correlation between their prominent visual features and those of her previous allies, it streaks toward them based on the probability of their engaging the Reavers, either as distraction allowing its escape or (less optimally) assisting it in battle.

It has wagered correctly. The raiders, after a frantic, barked order, break from cover in separate directions. The ghouls split their attack, two of the lesser humanoids remaining focused on ED-E. Unable to escape, it rolls and turns to set himself in the middle and slightly in front of the humans, pattering the lead Reaver about the head and burning out one eye.

The damage begins to heal quickly, cooking in the intense radioactivity of its own body, but the thing’s hiss of pain has the desired effect, rallying the humans to see ED-E as an unexpected ally and opening fire themselves. Now tagged as a saviour, ED-E is free to drop behind and allow the humans to take the bulk of the damage, luring the simpler ferals away from the big Reavers’ healing radius and quickly putting them down.

She has settled herself on the edge of the roof and, finding ED-E pinned down with the raiders, sets herself to killing the closer Reaver, carefully shooting around the humans. For now, anyway. The door below her bangs open with a war cry and more filthy humans spill out, catching the ferals in a weak claw of living flesh. She works fast, still cautious of the crowd, now shifting her efforts between the two biggest targets depending on which is doing more damage. Bullet after bullet slides smoothly into those molten skulls while the raiders shoot and hack blindly, slowing their healing where it matters. Her ED-E dances among them, having taken out the smaller targets, banking neatly around heads and shoulders to blind the bastards.

And one of those raiders has all the luck she lacks, not to mention an arm like a Brahmin’s hind leg. With a wild blow, he cleaves the stronger Reaver’s head straight off its neck but for a scrap of skin holding it on. The spine is severed, and the odds turn.

They’ve won more quickly than she has any right to expect, made two corpses that smoulder and bubble the ancient macadam. No deaths, by some miracle, but burns and slashes aplenty. In the abrupt quiet of victory, they turn to look up on her on their roof, Reaver-killing rifle still cocked, ED-E now floating just beneath her.

After a long minute of inadvertent, trigger twitching armistice, she asks: “You got any jet?”

Inside the Highway Patrol building, the atmosphere is thick with more than its usual stench. ED-E keeps to a corner, waiting for its user’s response, but she watches the raiders, and they watch her. ED-E, they ignore after a few dull glances and a thrown pencil fail to spark off laser retaliation. She trades fresh cactus fruits and gecko jerky for two ampules of jet, but gives the wounded her bags of healing powder. Her bag is empty enough that they see it’s all she has, when she casually tips it wide enough for anyone to look in – aside from enough ammo to give the gang a rough time. The gift (and her near-worthless belongings, and her killer’s hands) get her out the door with a wave and an empty promise to stop in next time she’s by, if she carries better trade.

Its user shakes its head and breathes hard as they leave, ED-E still waiting for its end of line. She stops by the corpses, where they’ll lay to rot even as they slowly radiate the gang inside, turns to look at ED-E.

He beeps at her in his plaintive way, and she can’t help but pull him down to chest level for a double-armed hug, chortling to herself at the madness of it all. “Good boy, ED-E. Good boy. Good boy.”

And ED-E takes note, adding another layer to its subroutines. It is a very good boy.


End file.
